Word: manhattanization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That happened again last week during a four-day mania on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The setting was the U.S. showroom of the auctioneer Sotheby's; the occasion, the public sale of 5,914 personal items belonging to the estate of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. And the outcome was not only a bewildering binge of conspicuous consumption but a perverse tribute, crass in some eyes and innocently romantic in others, to the allure of nostalgia and of the woman who single-handedly, and in many ways involuntarily, redefined the culture of celebrity...
...first day of the auction, Manhattan interior designer Juan Molyneux bought Jackie's engraved sterling-silver Tiffany tape measure for $48,875. Sotheby's ruled it would be worth $500 to $700. "When I bought the tape measure," says Molyneux, "the first thing I measured was my sanity...
Selling was the last thing on the mind of many of the triumphant bidders. Still, how long can even the euphoria of possession last? Louise Grunwald, a Manhattan friend of Jackie's, questions the motives of the eager buyers: "Some of it's got to be greed. Or is it to show your grandchild in 20 years, 'Look what I bought!'? But in 20 years that grandchild is not going to know who Jackie Kennedy...
LOWELL LIEBERMANN, 35; Manhattan, Composer "Haunted" as a teen by Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Liebermann knew he had to set the novel to music one day. Two decades and three Juilliard degrees later, he will see his first opera (of the same title), for which he adapted the text from the 1891 original, premiere next week at the Opera de Monte-Carlo in Monaco. (Princess Caroline, president of the Monaco Spring Arts Festival, encouraged Liebermann's work, and the piece is dedicated to her.) The composer does sense an affinity, in part, with Wilde's portrait...
SENOR WENCES, 100, MANHATTAN; Ventriloquist from TV's golden age His guttural "s'all right" and squeaky "s'okay" have somehow remained part of the American comic vocabulary even as Senor Wences has faded from sight. Last week the ventriloquist quietly celebrated his 100th birthday with family in Manhattan before taking off for his customary half-year in his native Spain. Senor Wences was a staple on TV for three decades, starting on the Ed Sullivan Show, where he conducted absurd conversations with his dummy Pedro, his puppet Cecelia the chicken, or the blond-wigged Johnny, a face he painted...